The paper critically reviews the intentional model of power in organizational management from seven different perspectives. It summarizes some of the most debated issues within political science over the recent decades in relation to an intentional understanding of the concept of power. We claim that these issues are also relevant within organizational management and strategy studies, and we point, in particular, to two contemporary research areas, in which the intentional concept of power seems inadequate to further push the research agenda.

This is a collection of talks on usability and culture with prominent researchers and practitioners on the Indian interaction design and usability scene: Apala Chavan, Anirudha Joshi, Dinesh Katre, Devashish Pandya, Sammeer Chabukswar, and Pradeep Yammiyavar. I did these talks because for several years I have been the coordinator of a cross cultural research project in India, China and Denmark that aims at investigating the impact of culture on the results of established methods of usability testing. During these years I gradually have come to realize the need for letting the prominent researchers and practitioners in the Indian software industry and university world speak about the big questions in the field. Without this grand context, it is in fact impossible to understand what research experiments will tell us about interaction design and usability in India and abroad. Therefore I first give an introduction to cultural usability and then present the six talks.

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The dissertation ‘Interactive Approaches to Rural Development’ gives new
theoretical and empirical knowledge in the collaboration on development of
rural areas and landscapes. From a perspective about the development and the
challenges faced, the study analyses which functions that are demanded by the
rural areas. Furthermore, the study makes an analysis of the collaboration in an
EU financed rural development association; the Local Action Group (LAG). The
overall objective is to:
Analyse and discuss approaches to rural development under Danish
conditions.
The dissertation is cantered around three papers introduced with a frame that
contributes to the overall objective. With point of departure in the changes that
have structured the Danish landscape, the first paper analyses and discusses how
the Danish planning system can be optimized to plan for a multifunctional
landscape. Paper two and three builds on the EU rural development policy
LEADER that through local project based development supports new income
opportunities for the local inhabitants.
Collaboration on the rural development is a subject that requires an
interdisciplinary analytical approach. The dissertation therefore builds on
different theories and both qualitative and quantitative analytical methods. The
theoretical foundation draws on generic network theory and various applications
of this. This is conducted by inclusion of ideas from interorganisational
interaction in an analysis of the collaboration between municipality and a locally
anchored development association. In addition the theory of social capital is
applied to analyse whether the partnership formation and collaboration has
supported the development of the local area. Furthermore, the concept of multifunctionality is assessed as a principle to be applied in countryside
planning and rural development. The empirical foundation of the dissertation
draws on mixed method research approach with interviews and surveys that are
studied through qualitative and quantitative data analyses. Two of the three
papers take point of departure in a case study of LAG-Djursland.
Based on the dissertation it is concluded, that a crucial factor in the development
of rural areas and landscapes is the collaboration among relevant stakeholders–
often arranged around a partnership. To secure a concrete and locally attuned
development it is important to engage local anchored stakeholders. These
stakeholders have the greatest knowledge about the local development
opportunities and barriers. Though the dissertation builds on experiences from
the Danish rural landscape, the analyses, discussions and conclusions will be
relevant in an international perspective. The interactive approach and the
analysis hereof will be applicable in other domains than that of rural
development.

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Assessing the Impact of Global Economics on Industrial Developments and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Penang, Malaysia

Jacobsen, Michael(Frederiksberg, 2010)

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Due to the increasingly integration and thus inter-dependency between the global economy, a given national economy and their societal embedment a triangulation between the three elements is a must if one is to understand the dynamic processes between them. This article focuses especially on the national economic and societal aspects of such a triangulation thus positioning the national dependencies of the global economy in the background. The notion of triangulation is perceived by the author to be more holistic and relational oriented compared to an approach based on decoupling. The latter aims through sector defined studies to assess the level of connectivity between global and national economics as well as between them and their societal embedment in order to detect whether there are potential fault-lines between the three thus mitigating the notion of decoupling. This article applies a triangular approach on the electronic and electrical manufacturing sector in Penang. It concentrates in particular on how companies within this sector relate to pertinent governmental initiated industry policies and the impact of the inter-ethnic related affirmative action policy in this connection. The global aspect of the triangulation has thus been put on a back burner in this study, as the article emphasises the importance of pointing towards the inter-dependency between the political, the inter-ethnic and the economic sectors in Penang, as they are perceived to condition each other.

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Interdisciplinarity is in the DNA of the iSchools. This workshop invites you to discuss how inter-disciplinarity plays out in theory and practice. The workshop addresses the uniqueness of the iSchools, provides an interactive framework to discuss and reflect on interdisciplinary practice. It suggests some models and tools to describe relations between disciplines, while offering a venue to brainstorm and envision issues of interest with like-minded colleagues. The purpose of this workshop is to establish a setting for continuous dialogue among colleagues on how interdisciplinarity plays out in practice. The workshop aims to create a forum for reflection on local inter-disciplinary practice(s) and to consider the possibilities of forming research networks. The workshop opens with a panel presentation from iSchool deans and senior faculty discussing current interdisciplinarity practices in iSchools and with presentations that address theoretical frameworks of interdisciplinarity. These presentations will form the basis for small group discussions in the afternoon.

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This paper examines the influence of European integration on the relationship between state administration and private interests in the four Nordic countries – Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. By private interests I mean interest organizations, private corporations and independent experts. The paper focuses exclusively on the national policy processes that are involved with managing European Union (EU) issues. More specifically, this paper discusses two aspects of multi-level governance. First is the important role of private interests in the coordination of decision making at the national level preceding their government’s representation of national interests in the European Council of Ministers and other EU organizations. Second is the effect of all this on national democratic systems.

This paper questions the overall role of interfirm linkages in industrial dynamics. Studying Danish trucking and congress tourism, the paper addresses a number of particular questions concerning how industry responds to changing conditions. In trucking, the important interfirm linkages are pecuniary and entails nontrivial exchange among multiple dispersed agents, while in congress tourism Inter-organizational linkages are more strategic, with the activities of multiple agents forming together into products, without direct exchange.

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This dissertation explores the internal antecedents of the phenomenon labeled management innovation. Management innovation refers to the implementation of new management practices, processes, techniques or structures that alter the way the work of management is performed. In other words, management innovation refers to changes in what managers do and how they do it.

Management innovation is the introduction of new management practices that significantly alter the way
the work of management is performed. Building on behavioral theory of the firm, this paper explores the
effect of firms’ diagnostic capability and implementation capability on the likelihood of adopting new‐to‐thefirm
and new‐to‐the‐industry management innovations. The paper finds that formalized activities directed at
developing and implementing management innovations as well as CEO novelty increases the likelihood of
innovating in both categories. Also, top management team (TMT) diversity increases the likelihood of
adopting new‐to‐the‐industry innovations. The paper does not find a direct effect of performance decline on
the likelihood of implementing management innovation, but two variables, TMT diversity and previous
experience, positively moderate the relationship between performance decline and new‐to‐the‐industry
management innovation.

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a study of how organisational identity influences the strategy-making process

Kjærgaard, Annemette(København, 2004)

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Organisations have to deal with increasingly complex and turbulent environments, which demand that they continuously change and adapt to new circumstances or challenges. One way for organisations to cope with these challenges is to manage the strategy-making process in order to ensure that a continuous stream of new ideas and initiatives create new opportunities and ensure that the company stays viable by adapting to new internal and external challenges. This has been pursued in studies of strategy formation (Mintzberg, 1978), strategic change (Pettigrew, 1988) and internal corporate venturing (Burgelman, 1983b, 2002) and is still a central issue in the strategic management discourse.
It is generally acknowledged that continuous change is important for organisations’ survival in a changing world. On the other hand the need for stability and continuity in form of a clear and strong corporate identity is also acknowledged to be critical for organisational success (Collins & Porras, 1994). Where the organisational identity works to ensure consistency in the company’s strategic action, the strategy making process works to renew the current concept of strategy (Burgelman, 1983b). Organisations thus face a dilemma when they engage in strategy-making to reconcile the perpetual tension between continuity and change (Burgelman, 2002). This challenge is far from new and has been discussed as e.g. the balance between exploration and exploitation (March, 1991).
This article attempts to answer the question of how organisational actors’ perception of organisational identity influences the strategy-making process during organisational change. The study adopts an evolutionary approach to the unfolding of the strategy-making process, using the variation-selection-retention framework of cultural evolutionary theory (Aldrich, 1999; Campbell, 1969; Weick, 1979), which has been applied to the strategy-making process by Burgelman in several of his works (Burgelman, 1983a, 1983b, 1991, 2002, 2003).

This paper adopts a behavioral theory of the firm perspective in order to compare the antecedents of two
types of innovation: Management innovation refers to the adoption of new management practices or
organizational structures, whereas product innovation refers to the introduction of new products or
services on the market. The study further distinguishes between two categories of innovation within each
type: new to the firm and new to the industry innovations. The findings indicate that there are more
differences than similarities between the antecedents of the two types of innovation. However, adopting
either type of innovation increases the likelihood of simultaneously adopting the other.

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An Organizational Economics Interpretation of the Rise and Decline of the Spaghetti Organization

Foss, Nicolai Juul(København, 2000)

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At the beginning of the 1990s, Danish hearing aid producer, Oticon became world famous for its radical empowerment and delegation experiment, popularly called the "spaghetti organization." Recent work has interpreted the spaghetti experiment as a radical attempt to foster dynamic capabilities by imposing structural ambiguity on the organization (Lovas and Ghoshal 2000; Verona and Ravasi 1999; Ravasi and Verona 2000). However, this work has neglected that about a decade later, many of the more radical elements of the spaghetti organization have been left. This paper presents an organizational economics interpretation of the spaghetti organization and its subsequent transformation. In such an interpretation, the spaghetti organization imposed significant organizational costs that could be tolerated as long as the benefits produced by the spaghetti organization dominated the costs. One source of organizational costs that the paper focuses on turn on the potential contradiction involved in combining a strong manager who possesses ultimate decision rights with widespread delegation. Apparently, Oticon management failed to solve, or didn’t even realize the nature of, the resulting commitment problem. A number of implications are developed, particularly with respect to the firm-market dichotomy.

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Lovas and Ghoshal (2000) developed the notion of "strategy as guided evolution," using the case of Oticon A/S. This note points out that the radical "spaghetti" organization described by Lovas and Ghoshal has been partially abandoned in Oticon. Developing an organizational economics interpretation of this episode, the present note argues that there are important implications for the understanding of the conditions under which internal hybrids may be viable and contribute to competitive advantage. The main focus in on the managerial commitment problem. Testable propositions are derived.